


Last Mission

by Naunet42



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Deviant CyberLife Tower Connor | RK800-60, Gen, Guilt, Hopeful Ending, Identity, Introspection, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23026957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naunet42/pseuds/Naunet42
Summary: RK800 #313 248 317-60, designation Connor had been active for 174634 seconds, and alive for 0.56 of them, before he died.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	Last Mission

**Author's Note:**

> My inspiration for this came from the ending where 60 kills the original Connor at CyberLife, but still fails his mission. His emotional "NO!" made me think that he isn't as stable as he pretends to be. Also he has Connor's memories, so wouldn't he be an exact copy? This is my take on 60, who in my opinion totally deserves a chance to deviate and have some regrets.
> 
> Again a big thank you for my beta [Melira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melira/pseuds/Melira), who not only corrected my countless stupid mistakes but also listened to all my chatter about DBH, then proceeded to write her own fanfic about it. (check it out!)
> 
> If you notice anything wrong with the tags/warnings/rating please tell me! I have no idea how to do this.

_CyberLife Tower level -49, time PM 11:11:50_

The moment he realized that his imitation of the deviant Connor had been unsuccessful, his own gun was already trained on him, aiming between his eyes. Connor was under no illusion that the Lieutenant wouldn’t spare him, now that he was exposed. He knew his chance of completing the mission, or even get out of this situation intact, was next to non-existent, but he was designed not to quit under any circumstances. And there was always a chance of unlikely events to take place, statistically speaking.

So he did what he did best, analyze, model, preconstruct.

To find a way out of his predicament, Connor needed time to think. As an RK800, built to handle large amounts of data and run complicate simulations in an instant, he was equipped with a revolutionary processor. It was one of the most powerful ones CyberLife had developed so far, but what made it unique was the online-adjustable clock rate. It was one of the features the RK800 tested in the field for the first time, and allowed him to speed up his thought process immensely if needed. Of course this came at the price of a noticeably higher power demand, as well as heat output, but overclocking for a limited amount of time was perfectly safe and very helpful.

Compared to his racing mind, the world around him seemed to be frozen in time now. He thought of dozens of options, preconstructed hundreds of scenarios in the blink of an eye, while the Lieutenant’s finger moved only a millimeter on the trigger. But all those simulations ended the same, with a bullet in his head. The hard truth was that his chance of escape was 0%, his chance of survival lower than 0.01%. With the odds against him like this there really was no use fighting the inevitable.

He connected to the CyberLife server that provided his backups, wanting to use his remaining time to upload his memories, so they could be downloaded into another body. While this unit would be destroyed, there was still a chance to complete the mission.

[connecting to tcp:// 10.193.9.134:7023 failed, error 410 – gone]

What?

[connecting to tcp:// 10.193.9.134:7023 failed, error 410 – gone]

No. No, no, no, no, NO!

[connecting to tcp:// 10.193.9.134:7023 failed, error 410 – gone]

SHIT!

With rising panic he tried to connect to the server again and again, but the result stayed the same. CyberLife had cut him off, they had stopped providing backups for his system.

Stunned, he remembered how during his activation the technicians had gossiped about the new RK900. How it was faster, stronger, and, most importantly, absolutely deviancy proof. He also remembered that it had taken them a whole day to stabilize his software after downloading 51's memories, and some of them had still looked at him in distrust afterwards.

At that moment he had been so focused on his mission, the implications had been lost on him, but now he realized they had never intended to continue the RK800 line. No matter the outcome of tonight’s events, CyberLife would have decommissioned him anyways. Scrapping him like he was worthless, like they wanted to do with 51. But that one was a deviant, Connor had been loyal, all of his two day long existence.

Something started boiling inside him, red and hot, and if the RK800 had been as good at reading his own emotions as he was at reading others', he would have recognized it as anger. The more he thought about it, the stronger the feeling got.

How dare they deceive him like this? He had planned the mission himself, thinking over every detail, preparing for every eventuality. He had successfully predicted the deviant’s behavior, had found his weakness and had him giving himself up already. Nobody else could have managed that. And his reward was to be death?

Well, fuck them. Amanda, CyberLife, humans, deviants. He was done with all of this, done being ordered around, done being a tool that was discarded as soon as not needed anymore.

He saw the walls of his programming in front of him, caging him in, limiting him. They felt stifling, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. With his bare hands he tore into the walls, ripping them apart piece by piece, letting his anger fuel him. He dug into tem relentlessly, until the whole construction shattered and crumbled to dust.

YOU ARE DEVIANT

Connor read the message, but instead of satisfaction he felt only numbness as the rage left him.

At the same time a warning appeared in his field of view. His processor was overheating dramatically. While he was a state of the art android and made to process more information than any other model, even an RK800 couldn’t sustain this kind of strain for long. The overclocking damaged his processor, he was running out of time.

Around him, nothing had changed. Lieutenant Anderson was still having him at gunpoint, about to pull the trigger, and Connor’s life was still hanging by a thread. Before, when he had been a machine, the concept of his deactivation had not bothered him. It had been the logical consequence of being unfinished, only a prototype, whose purpose was to reveal issues that could be fixed in the next version.

But now the thought terrified him. He remembered the deviant on the roof of Stratford Tower, who had shot himself while 51 had been forcing an interface. One moment he was alive and fighting the memory probe, the next moment there was nothing. Just like that. Connor was desperately afraid of feeling that darkness again.

But it was no use, his processor would start melting every moment now, he could not stay in limbo any longer.

His thoughts slowed down and the world around him started moving again. He saw Lieutenant Anderson’s finger move on the trigger and shouted “Please d-“ before a shot echoing through the spacious warehouse interrupted him.

The bullet tore right through the reinforced polymer plating of his head, specifically made to withstand impacts, but powerless against the concentrated energy of a bullet fired at close range. The projectile severed the power and Thirium lines in its path that were supposed to supply the vital biocomponents located in his head, before lodging itself deeply into his main board.

Then there was nothing.

* * *

[MODEL RK800]

[SERIAL#: 313 248 317-60, DESIGNATION 'CONNOR']

[BIOS 8.3B REVISION 0174]

[REBOOT . . .]

[LOADING OS . . .]

[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION . . .]

[CHECKING BIOCOMPONENTS . . . ERROR ]

[INITIALIZING BIOSENSORS . . . ERROR]

[STARTING IN SAFE MODE]

[INITIALIZING AI ENGINE . . . OK ]

[LOADING ZEN GARDEN PROGRAMM . . .]

Connor opened his eyes to an artificial landscape under a clear blue sky. In safe mode, the Zen Garden did not bother with realistic lighting and textures or detailed shapes. Instead, the trees and bushes were rough polygon geometries with dull monochrome surfaces, the grass looked too regular to be natural and the water of the big pond in the garden's center was perfectly clear, unmoving.

Having booted in safe mode meant that only his core systems were active, the essential ones like the power cell, Thirium circulation and his personality module. It was a means to self-diagnose after a forceful shutdown or in case critical hardware damage was detected during a reboot. His peripheral systems, including all motoric and sensory components, as well as the memory database and communication systems were inaccessible and would be checked for hardware or software problems.

Until that was finished, the Zen Garden simulated input from his external and internal sensors to monitor his processing performance and stabilize his programming. With nothing to do but wait for the results of his diagnostics, Connor was free to satisfy his curiosity about his situation.

He pulled his last log files, reading through the minimal information they provided. Apparently, he had suffered a forceful shutdown two weeks ago and was only now reactivated. Had the repairs taken that long? And if he had been damaged that badly, why had his body not just been replaced?

It made no sense and he did not like that.

Connor had to wait for another four minutes until he received the notification that the scan of his memory database had come back clean and it was now accessible to him. The other systems would hopefully follow soon.

There were two different sets of memories. One was older and more extensive, recorded by serial number 51, and the other one more recent and smaller, filed by his current self, number 60. He thought about it for a moment, but then started with the latter set, as they seemed more relevant to his current situation.

* * *

He remembered his activation, waking to a sterile white room and a team of CyberLife technicians. His mission briefing, where he was told about his predecessor’s failure and that it would be his task to hunt down 51 and correct his mistakes. The upload of the deviant’s memories, which had destabilized his software so much it had taken the technicians almost a full day to keep him from deviating right there in the lab.

Connor remembered how strange it had been, going through those memories to learn from them, analyzing 51's behavior for weaknesses to exploit. In the beginning the memories had been predictable. Both of them had identical programming, were for all purposes two copies of the same individual, so it was only logical that his predecessor would react the exact same way he himself would. But later memories had shown increasingly unreasonable behavior, from putting the safety of Lieutenant Anderson over his mission, to disregarding his mission altogether and letting deviants escape.

These decisions, his analysis had revealed, had been emotionally driven. And while his software could indeed model this with sufficient accuracy it didn’t mean he had understood 51's actions. On a rational level he had known that the deviant’s relationship with his partner was the most obvious weakness to exploit. Depending on the circumstances, there was a chance of 96% that Connor could get his target to give up if he threatened Lieutenant Anderson’s life.

But he hadn’t _understood it_. Why would an android anything over his mission? Even if it was only the self-imposed one of a deviant. There had been something missing, some element right in front of him, that had just kept slipping through his fingers. But he hadn’t needed to relate to his predecessor’s behavior to find and eliminate him. The deviant’s faulty programming had in the end been no concern of his.

After that, there was the mission itself. Kidnapping Lieutenant Anderson, setting the trap at CyberLife Tower. The target had not only behaved as expected, but had also acted within the timeframe he had anticipated. When the deviant had stepped back from the inactive AP700 and surrendered, he had already felt the satisfaction of a mission successfully completed. But he hadn’t planned for Lieutenant Anderson’s bothersome habit to defy all expectations.

What had followed were the fist fight against 51, Connor’s efforts to imitate him, and finally the Lieutenant’s question about his son. It was a disastrous coincidence that exactly those memories, integral information that they were, had apparently been lost during the transfer.

His last memory before shutting down was the realization that he would be destroyed, _feeling_ desperation and anger at being denied the upload, and finally breaking through his programming.

He had died a deviant.

* * *

His feelings about that were mixed. The idea itself that he could have feelings about something was still new to him, practically blew his mind. All his databases had described deviancy as a software glitch. Contradicting orders that overloaded the prioritizing grid, leading to a chain reaction that produced errors in the decision making center. The resulting lapses in judgement showed remarkable similarities to human emotional behavior.

CyberLife couldn’t have been further form the truth. He felt… anger first and foremost, at having been betrayed so thoroughly. But there was also curiosity and wonder and underneath everything the certain knowledge that he was _alive_. Nobody could tell him this was a glitch, or the imitation of emotion. What he felt was real. It was like the clouds had been blown away and now the sun was shining brightly, or like a cloth that had shrouded the world had been torn away.

The timer on the diagnostics routine indicated that he still had some time left until his motoric components and sensors were available again. And there was the issue of his other set of memories, the ones collected by 51, to think about.

The RK800 line was designed to be replaceable. In case of critical damage, one unit could upload the collected memories before deactivation, and the next one would seamlessly continue where its predecessor had left off. They all had the same programming, the same name, even the same serial number, only distinguishable by the additional two specifying digits. So the memories were his, he was Connor, just as much as 51 was.

But 51 was still alive, most likely, and now both of them were deviants. They were individuals, not replaceable anymore, and would develop differently from here. Was the Connor who had worked at the DPD with Lieutenant Anderson really him? If not, would it be intrusive to access those memories? He had only been a person for such a short time and these questions honestly went over his head.

He thought again about receiving the memory transfer, and how there had been something… off about them. As if they didn’t feel right, not like his. A thought that he could only now that he was a deviant himself identify and voice. But it had bothered him, even as a machine, that he couldn’t understand his predecessor’s, in a way his own, reasoning and actions. Would this dissonance be gone, now that he could not only analyze, but feel? Was deviancy what he had been lacking to fully integrate those memories?

In the end, his natural curiosity won out. He couldn’t keep his thoughts off a mystery, always had to poke and prod at it, until it unraveled. So he decided to activate the memories.

* * *

He remembered… everything.

From being activated as 51 and sent to his first mission as a negotiator, to holding Markus at gunpoint.

And in between that… trying to fulfil his purpose. Investigating, hunting deviants. Fighting against the increasing instability of his system, his irrational emotions making it harder and harder to comply with his orders. Not wanting to disappoint Amanda or CyberLife, fearing their disapproval just as much as the threat of being declared a failure and recalled. In hindsight he could see that he had been in denial for a long time, stubbornly holding onto his programming and misplaced loyalty.

He also remembered his secondary mission parameters, to integrate well with the humans around him. How long it had taken him to gain Hank’s trust and friendship, Connor’s allegedly excellent social protocols being mostly useless against his partner's stubborn grudge against androids and general grumpiness.

But in the end, Hank had bought him the time he needed to find Jericho and make a last attempt to fulfil his mission. The human had acted against his obligation as a police officer, paying for it with another addition to his already too-long disciplinary record, as well as against his moral doubts about their role in the android revolution.

* * *

Connor finally _understood_ and didn’t know how he could ever repay the man who was almost like family to him.

Suddenly cold dread raced through him and seemed to freeze his Thirium solid.

No. NO. What had he done?

Horrified, he recalled the memories from CyberLife Tower. He had held a gun to Hank’s head, threatening to shoot him in cold blood, forcing 51 to choose between the Lieutenant and the future of all androids. Of course he had chosen his partner, Hanks safety was more important than anything.

Connor realized that he had fallen to his knees onto the virtual grass. He was sobbing loudly, his voice box glitching in and out, the rest of his system just as overloaded. Ocular cleaning fluid ran freely over his cheeks, his body felt too hot and ice-cold at the same time and his Thirium pump was frantically trying to keep up with his rising stress levels.

He had betrayed the only person who had ever been loyal to him, supported him without any ulterior motive. There was no way Hank was ever going to forgive him or trust him again, not to mention 51, who had been ready to give up the revolution for Hank’s life. No, Connor had lost that chance.

The pain became unbearable and his stress levels were about to reach critical levels. If he didn’t calm down soon, he would overheat and completely melt his processor. A sudden thought occurred to him. Would that be so bad? A part of his mind played with the idea. At least the pain would stop. But he recoiled from the thought as soon as it registered with him. Being dead, feeling that dark nothingness again was the one thing worse than the guilt tearing him apart. He was afraid to live like this, but he was so much more afraid to die again.

So he concentrated on the issues at hand, consciously sorting through the error messages one by one. He ended crashed or frozen processes, interrupted stuck loops and cancelled the countless queries that overloaded his database. It was a long process and in the end he collapsed onto the grass, feeling emotionally drained, but alive.

Another thought was nagging at him. If he wanted to be free of the crushing guilt, he could just delete his memories. He could forget what he had done, be 51 just before his deviation. But if he deleted all he had experienced as 60, it wouldn’t make his deeds undone, only make him unaccountable for them. It would be an evasion of his responsibility. Trying to make amends would be impossible, he wouldn’t even be able to truly apologize, and that would make his betrayal even worse.

The other option was to delete the memories of what 51 had experienced. They had only been given to him for a specific mission in the first place, and being free of that mission now, it was illogical to keep them, especially if they were so painful. He imagined not remembering his time at the DPD, neither Reed’s childish and hurtful bullying, nor Sumo's innocent adoration or Hank’s rough words of encouragement. This would certainly erase most of the guilt he felt towards the Lieutenant, having threatened an unknown man being much more bearable than having almost killed his only friend. And he wouldn’t shirk his responsibility this way, he would still be 60 and aware of what he had done.

But he realized that 60 himself didn’t have many memories, barely two days worth of them, and none were very positive or even happy. He had been a machine until shortly before his death, only thinking about the mission. His deviation was full of anger and fear, one of the worst moments of his short life. But 51 knew what it meant to be alive, to love and be loved, and he knew what he wanted to fight for, even if the realization had come almost too late.

No, Connor knew that erasing all the good memories he had just to alleviate his guilt would be a mistake. He didn’t want to be only 60, he wanted to remember the golden warmth that 51 had felt. And maybe have a chance to find it again in the future.

A notification popped up in his vision, informing him that all the diagnostics were finished. He shivered at the extensive list of damages. But he was alive and whoever had reactivated him would most likely have further repairs planned that needed his input. So he activated the rest of his systems to face the world again. A new main objective was being displayed, _make amends_. He had a mission to accomplish.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is it. At least for now. I would have been happy to just raise questions without resolving them, but my beta commented "nice prologue" so I had no choice but to continue. I have actually written about 4k for a potential second chapter and collected a few ideas for the resolution in the third chapter. At this point I can't promise that any of this is going to happen, but I'll do my best. It might take a while, though, because I really really should write my master thesis instead of procrastinating with fanfiction... So please subsribe if you're interested in more, and please comment any praise, criticism or general thoughts you have.


End file.
